Pandagon is daily opinion blog covering feminism, politics, and pop culture. Come for the politics, stay for the complete lack of patience for the B.S. and bad faith coming from conservative leaders and pundits.

The Undeniable Power Of Whitey

Star Parker opines that black people vote for Democrats because they need each other – for some reason, despite being one of the poorest subgroups of any stripe in America, black people are the invariant recipients of handouts that guarantee the hardest decision they have to make in life is Navigator or Escalade.

What got me, though, was this part:

Blacks, in fact, have the highest church attendance in the country. Seventy-six percent of black Democrats attend church at least monthly. Sixty-seven perce nt of Republicans do and 50 percent of white Democrats do.

A recent Gallup poll shows blacks more aligned with Republicans than Democrats on social issues — moral acceptability of homosexuality, abortion, and sexual promiscuity.

Earlier this year, Parker wrote on the disproportionately high abortion rate in the black community, making the predictable accusations of genocide on the part of Margaret Sanger’s shameful, shambling corpse. So we’re asked to believe two things: the first is that black people not only hate abortion, but they probably hate it more than good, Christian white people do. The second is that black women, because they’re dependent on Democrats to give them money and that drizzank, go out and have abortions like crazy anyway.

The basic economic theory of black dependence on the Democratic Party as laid out by Star Parker doesn’t help to resolve this puzzling riddle of a quandary, either:

So where’s the common ground? Income redistribution. A recent Zogby poll shows 80 percent of Democrats, 90 percent of liberals, and 76 percent of blacks supporting taxing the weal thy to give money back to low-income Americans.

Despite everything else, blacks vote to stay on the liberal plantation. Pop psychologists would call the relationship between wealthy liberals and blacks co-dependence.

Now, the major way that “wealthy liberals” redistribute money to low-income blacks, per popular conservative mythology, is through welfare. Welfare benefits increase with the number of babies you have. So, the real question becomes – if the major determinant of political behavior in the black community is getting that cash money, then why would you abort 18 years of guaranteed government gwap? It’s almost like a collection of poorly thought-out rationalizations of behavior based on a narrow and contradictory worldview can’t stand up to even the most remote scrutiny! What’s actually going on here, then? The first potential explanation is that the disconnect between the social views of most African Americans and those of the Democratic Party doesn’t really matter, because African Americans just don’t give a shit about them. However, this also presumes that the black religious experience is fundamentally meaningless, and that black moral beliefs are easily bought out by the highest bidder. However, black people don’t vote Republican, so…no.

The second potential explanation, per Ms. Parker, is that American blacks by and large are still bound by the plantation mentality of 150 years ago and have yet to break Massa’s terrible hold on them, except for the select few Negroes who’ve managed to see the light and become Republican. This would be a great explanation, except someone is going to have to explain how you’re fucking kidding me. Because you’re kidding me, right? This is so racist it makes The Bell Curve look like it was written by W.E.B. DuBois. It not only infantilizes black people in a way that makes them constant and unremitting pawns of white people (and unable and unwilling to escape Whitey’s clutches), but presumes at its core that black people, other than the select few lucky enough to be conservative pundits, are totally incapable of anything but the most base and greedy reaction to the world around them. It’s not an argument to free black people, it’s an argument to transfer them to more benevolent masters in order to salvage what’s left of the race as a whole. Declaring en masse that black culture as a whole has chosen to remain enslaved simply because you don’t like the culture isn’t speaking truth to ignorance, it’s just damning the entire culture because you’re too ignorant to engage it.

The third explanation is that despite moral objections to abortion, the black community still realizes that abortion is a necessary and rational out for women faced with raising a child they simply can’t raise (often on their own), and that rather than the dessicated ghost of Margaret Sanger leading black women into spiritual bondage through the neutral decor and inoffensive magazines available in the Planned Parenthood waiting lounge, women are making decisions based on what’s best for them. The discussion of abortion in the black community almost entirely revolves around accusations of mass murder being visited upon generations of teensy black fetuses, with absolutely no effort made to understand why these abortions are happening, other than speaking to the white overlords who must be the ones making the decisions. They are white, after all.

I’ve long searched for the explanation for why the Republican approach to the black community is so terribly counterproductive. Mainly, it focused on the idea that conservatives simply thought that black people were terribly immoral and corrupted decision makers. I was wrong, however; the issue is that conservatives tend not to think black people are decision makers at all, and are instead simply being made to do things by the real actors in society: white people. The Republican offer to black America isn’t a different set of values and priorities, it’s providing a different group of white people to dominate them. Dutiful black conservative emissaries toil away in well-compensated futility, letting the rest of us know just how great it feels to have given yourself over to Ronald Reagan and to be self-sufficient in a way that only pure tokenism allows you to be.

About the Author

Jesse Taylor is an attorney and blogger from the great state of Ohio. He founded Pandagon in July, 2002, and has also served on the campaign and in the administration of former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. He focuses on politics, race, law and pop culture, as well as the odd personal digression when the mood strikes.